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16 septembre 2021
- handle: 10670/1.icnwop
- isbn: 9781800640719
- eisbn: 9791036573927
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
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poetry history Europe nineteenth century eighteenth century philosophy literature America time British Romantic Frankenstein periodisation poetics of time ecology futurity opera atemporality Venice Literature, British Isles LIT000000 LIT004010 DS DSBSujets proches
Frontier troubles Hours (Time) Operas--History and criticism Opera, Comic Opera--History and criticism Comic opera Lyric drama AnnalsCiter ce document
Gregory Dart, « 3. Beethoven: Revolutionary Transformations », Open Book Publishers, ID : 10670/1.icnwop
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This chapter investigates Fidelio’s relation to the French Revolution by looking at it as the last of a series of revisitings of a revolutionary ‘spot of time’. First laid out by Bouilly and Gaveaux’s 1798 rescue opera, Léonore, ou L’Amour Conjugal (1798), which was supposedly based on a true story of the Jacobin Terror, this ‘spot’ was then returned to, and reworked, by several European composers of the early nineteenth century, who produced operas with the same plot, most notably Beethoven, whose Leonores of 1805 and 1806, and Fidelio of 1814 betray a subtly unstable perspective on recent revolutionary history. Lastly, this chapter looks at the role of melodrama in Beethoven’s opera, not only as a curious technical innovation, but also as a new means of conceiving of, and dramatising, historical action, and argues that one way of seeing the dénouement of 1814 is as an essentially conservative attempt to bury the traumatic vision of history—of history as sforzando—that its earlier incarnations had opened up.